The Herder Institute in Marburg, in collaboration with the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and the Gießen Centre for Eastern Europe (GiZo) at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen and financed through the Initiative for Research and Innovation of the Leibniz Association, offers for a duration of two years a graduate scholarship, starting from 1st October 2012 and a postdoc scholarship, starting from 1st October 2012. Applications for these scholarships are invited by August 20, 2012.
The graduate programme is devoted to a fundamental problem of the transfer of knowledge, which, in spite of the successes in the educational field which have come with the expansion of the EU to the east, still remains as controversial as ever – the increasing internationalisation of research and the shift that has taken place in concepts and forms of organisation. It is particularly in Central European East-West contexts that a consensus concerning the fundamental questions about cultures of knowledge is being characterised on the one hand by innovative borrowings, and, on the other, by an obstinate persistence in national traditions and patterns of interpretation. Against this, the Leibniz Graduate School sets the concept of multilateral transfer of knowledge through dialogue.
With this in mind, the main topic focuses on the value of cultures of knowledge in an Eastern European context. A fundamental element here is the cultural-academic approach, which derives from the Herder Institute’s tasks, resources and the extensive regional, national and international network of cooperation. In this light, the Leibniz Graduate School is open to all projected PhD theses that are specifically designed to make a substantive contribution to a discussion of the following topics:
– European academic cultures and academic communication from the early modern period to the present: forums, networks, people, generations, forms of socialisation, political background
– National and transnational categories of knowledge and intellectual styles
– Pluralisation, (self-)instrumentalisation, enforced standardisation, transformation of academic institutions
– Concepts and key terms in academic communication: nation, class, ethnicity, identity, gender, religion
– Academic cultures in an age of globalisation and the digital world
The graduate programme is aimed at up-and-coming research students from Eastern Central Europe or other countries. German doctoral students with relevant research projects are also highly welcome.
Further details are available at this website.